Murder Fantastical

by Patricia Moyes

  “Get Maud,” said Emmy urgently to Violet.

  “Get who?”

  “Maud. She’ll be able to deal with this.”

  “Maud? But…”

  “Get her!” said Emmy fiercely.

  Frank Mason, who had gone down on the ground with the barrel, arose like a loaf in a hot oven, his clothes and face whitened with bran, his hair like a red crust. He held a square, paper-wrapped package in his hand. “This is it!” he cried. A few people cheered. Frank scrabbled at the wrapping paper and tore it off. Inside was a jigsaw puzzle in a gaudy box. Frank flung it at Sir Claud with a howl of fury.

  “It’s not here! Somebody did get it!”

  “Somebody got what?” Maud had pushed her way into the circle.

  “My book!”

  “Oh, was that your book?” Maud sounded faintly amused. Frank glowered at her through his mask of bran. With enormous restraint, he said, “Yes.”

  “Well, I was deputizing for Uncle Claud,” said Maud, “and Alfred from The Viking came along to take a Lucky Dip. He pulled out this book. He seemed a bit fed up.”

  “Fed up? Certainly I was fed up!” Alfred’s voice, thin and indignant, came from the outskirts of the crowd. “Call that a Lucky Dip! It was all in some foreign sort of writing.”

  “What d’you expect for sixpence, Alf?” queried a local wit. “James Bond?”

  “What did you do with it?” shouted Frank.

  “Do with it? I gave it to the jumble.”

  “Jumble!”

  Frank Mason made a dive into the crowd.

  Maud cried, “Frank”—and went after him.

  Sir Claud remarked, “The young man is mad,” but he followed, picking pieces of jigsaw off his jacket as he went.

  Violet grabbed Emmy’s arm, and cried, “Stop him, Mrs. Tibbett! Lady Fenshire will be out at any moment!” And the two of them set off in pursuit. It is hardly necessary to add that the faceless crowd came trailing along behind.

  Isobel Thompson was taken by surprise. The jumble, or what remained of it, was at the far end of the lawn, and with so little stock left to sell, Mrs. Thompson was not taking her guardianship of the booth very seriously. In fact, when the invasion arrived, she was having a quiet cigarette and a chat with her husband, who had just completed his afternoon round of calls and was paying his duty visit to the Fête.

  The Thompsons’ first intimation that the comparative peace of the evening was shattered forever was Frank’s hunting cry of “Where is it? Where is it?” And then bedlam broke loose. The trestle table was overturned, the remaining feathered hats and decorated pots flew in all directions; Isobel Thompson screamed; Alec Thompson swore; and Violet Manciple burst into tears.

  In the midst of the confusion Maud said clearly and coldly, “It’s not here, Frank. You can see that for yourself.”

  “What’s the matter? What do you all want?” Isobel’s voice was a squeak of alarm and emotion.

  Maud said, “Alfred brought you a book to sell…”

  Isobel’s face cleared a little. “Yes, that’s right. He’d gotten it in the Lucky Dip, and he said he couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and that I could have it for jumble…”

  “All in foreign writing,” added Alfred from the outskirts.

  “What happened to it?” demanded Frank. Sweat was beginning to run down his face, making furrows in the bran.

  “Lady Manciple bought it,” said Isobel.

  “Aunt Ramona?” Maud queried.

  “That’s right. She said something about it being a Manciple book. She was having her tea break. She took it with her, back into the fortune teller’s tent.”

  There was a moment of bated breath, while every head turned toward the frail canvas structure embellished with golden paper stars and mysterious zodiacal signs. Then the hunt was off again in full cry.

  Inside the tent Ramona had laid out a row of grubby cards and was gazing earnestly into the upturned fish bowl. It was curious, she thought to herself, how she sometimes did have an intuition about these things. Not that she subscribed to any of Aunt Dora’s ridiculous superstitions, of course. She and Claud were both devout atheists, materialists, and humanists. They believed in what they could see and hear and smell and touch. Nevertheless, playing this childish game of fortune-telling, Ramona sometimes had strange misgivings. The cards and the gold fish bowl did, more and more frequently, seem to raise images in her mind. Purely subjective, of course. Ramona wondered whether she might be imagining things as a result of guilt feelings, a consciousness of betraying her convictions by supporting so barbaric and outdated a cause as the Church Roof Restoration Fund, The church, of course, fulfilled a certain social function; she and Claud were agreed on that. But they were both convinced that as the age of scientific enlightenment dawned, the church would wither away spontaneously, her usefulness outlived and her bigoted dogmas swallowed up in the light of pure reason. Edwin, of course, would never understand this point of view, and it had given rise to many stimulating discussions within the family circle.

  “Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art…” murmured Ramona like an incantation.

  “Eh?” said her client, a plump and comely farmer’s daughter called Lily.

  Ramona pulled herself together. “I can see,” she began, and then stopped. The usual patter about the handsome young man and the short journey simply would not come. It stuck in her throat. Suddenly it seemed to Ramona that everything went dark, like blood, before her eyes. Only the mesmeric surface of the shining bowl grew brighter, compelling attention, and in the shimmering brightness she seemed to see a face. She heard her own voice saying, “Dark—dark—dark and fair—dark and light—he brings the darkness—there is darkness in the light—there are people—I see people—many people…”

  “Eh?” said Lily again. She had heard people say that Lady Manciple was a little touched, and she was beginning to think it an understatement.

  “Evil,” moaned Lady Manciple, “coming nearer—darkness—people—people are coming—”

  “I can hear a funny noise, now you mention it,” said Lily, “like people running.”

  Ramona stood up, her eyes wild, “Fly!” she cried, “Fly from the evil! Fly from…”

  She got no further. Neither she nor Lily had time to act on this very sensible advice, for the mob was upon them. The tent, of course, never had a chance. Frank Mason’s entry ripped the flap from its moorings; Violet tripped over a guy rope and uprooted one peg; and the whole thing collapsed with a certain slow grace. The darkness, as Ramona had prophesied, descended.

  It took a considerable time to disentangle the tent from its occupants. Lily, who had jumped to the not unreasonable conclusion that the end of the world had come, was having hysterics somewhere beneath the canvas folds. Another part of the wreckage, which was behaving like an active and blasphemous sack of potatoes, was Frank Mason. The guy rope had brought Violet down, and she was now sitting, rubbing her ankle, on what appeared to be a comfortable cushion covered in canvas. It was, in fact, Ramona.

  Sir Claud was shouting for his wife. He had given up all thoughts of rational and predictable behavior by now and was solely concerned with getting out of the Fête alive. As for the crowd, it had swelled to include virtually everyone left within the grounds of Cregwell Grange. Only those privileged few who had been in on the affair from the beginning had even the haziest idea of what it was all about. Rumor ran riot. They were chasing a dangerous burglar. Young Mr. Mason had gone off his head and attacked Sir Claud. Something was on fire. The Communists were at the bottom of it. Somebody had been shot—the sound of firing from the range reinforced this theory. Mrs. Richards was tearfully begging the Vicar to intervene, and the Reverend Herbert Dishforth advanced—all hundred and fifty-one pounds and six ounces of him—to take part in the affray.

  “Er—is something wrong, Mrs. Manciple?” he inquired.

  “Where’s Ramona?” shouted Sir Claud.

  “Oh, Vicar,” Violet began woefully.
>
  “Somebody,” said a deep, clear voice from beneath her, “is sitting on me.”

  Violet jumped up as though stung.

  “Ramona!” yelled Claud. “Speak to me!”

  “Get me out of this bloody tent!” bellowed Frank.

  “Help!” screamed Lily.

  “Get my wife out of there, Violet!”

  “Who the hell are you?” came a muffled roar from Frank.

  It was answered by Lily’s shrill, “Take your hands off of me!”

  The tent appeared to undergo some sort of convulsive fit. At the end of it, Lady Manciple emerged. Her hair was tangled and her dress torn and she had lost one earring, but she was surprisingly serene. She got to her feet with her husband’s help, and said, “I have just had the most extraordinary experience, Claud.”

  “I can see that,” said Sir Claud grimly. “Come out of there, young Mason. I want a word with you.”

  The tent heaved again. From beneath it Lily giggled and cried, “Oh, you are a one!” She seemed to have made a rapid reappraisal of the situation and decided that the world had not ended for the time being. Perhaps fortunately, all that could be heard of Frank Mason’s reply was an urgent demand to “Get out of my way, damn you, you…” The rest was inaudible.

  Ramona said calmly, “A spiritual experience, Claud. In the light of it, I shall have to reconsider my whole attitude to psychic phenomena. What a pity Aunt Dora could not be with us.”

  Mason emerged from the wreckage of the tent like a cork from a champagne bottle. His appearance had not been improved by his most recent experience. Mingled with the bran was now a quantity of mud, and several cabbalistic signs in colored paper adhered to various parts of his person. Addressing Ramona, he said, “Where’s my book?”

  “Your what, Mr. Mason?”

  “My book! My book! The one you bought from the jumble booth! The leather-bound…”

  “Oh, the book from the Manciple library? That’s not your book, Mr. Mason.” Ramona sounded perfectly calm.

  “It damn well is. It’s from my father’s library. He bought it, and it was his, and now it’s mine, and I want it.”

  “I bought it,” Ramona corrected him gently, “from the jumble booth.”

  “It shouldn’t have been there. It was all a mistake…”

  “In any case,” Lady Manciple went on, “I haven’t got it any more.”

  “What d’you mean, you haven’t got it?”

  “Julian has it. He came to visit me in my tent, saw the book, and took it away with him. I don’t know why he seemed so interested in it.”

  Mason let out a howl of fury. “Let me get at him! Where is he? Where is he?”

  As if in answer, a shot rang out from the range, and the Vicar said, “I saw Mr. Manning-Richards making his way toward the shooting range not many minutes ago. I think he must be there with Major Manciple and the Bishop.”

  Once again there was a moment of silence, of scenting and pointing, as all heads turned toward the privet hedge. And then the pack was off.

  There were several quiet men in the car with Henry, and they all looked grave, not to say grim. They also looked curiously alike, one to the other, as impersonal as Erinyes, and as implacable. Henry sat miserably in the driving seat, wishing himself a thousand miles away.

  He said, “There’s a Village Fête going on in the grounds, as I told you. I think we should be able to get him without attracting too much attention.” The quiet men remained quiet. “I’d be grateful,” said Henry, “if you could do this with as little—as little fuss as possible. It’ll be bad enough for the Manciples, without…”

  Again the silence. At last one quiet man said, “The girl will have to be thoroughly investigated. You understand that, Tibbett?”

  “Of course. But I feel sure…”

  “We’ll be sure when we’re sure.”

  Another silence.

  Then Henry said, “I suppose we’ll never know his contact at the Soviet Embassy.”

  The quiet man almost smiled. “I could tell you his name,” he said. “But we’ll never prove it, of course.” He paused, and then added, “The Manning-Richards boy was known to the jewelers because he brought in pieces to sell. That was how he was paid. Quite ingenious. It was clever of you to think of making inquiries there.”

  “When I heard that he hadn’t gone in to buy the ring until after lunch on Saturday,” said Henry, “I realized that he’d been somewhere else in London in the morning. The jeweler was just intended to provide an excuse for his trip to London. I suppose he was worried about Mason’s death and wanted to get instructions.”

  “I dare say,” said the quiet man. “Again, we’ll never prove where he was on Saturday morning. Not that it matters. There was enough in his apartment…” He lit a cigarette. “Ingenious, those tiny microfilm copiers and the radio transmitter in the camera case. Yes, we’ve got enough to put him away for a long, long time.” He sighed. “One can’t help feeling almost sorry for them. All those years of preparation, and now we get him before he can start on the job. Seems a waste, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Henry, “yes, it does.” He was thinking of Maud.

  There were several cars parked in the drive of Cregwell Grange when they arrived, but the gardens seemed curiously deserted. Henry, followed by his posse of quiet men, made his way to the deserted lawn, which exhibited many of the characteristics of a battlefield on the morning after. A tangle of torn canvas and twisted ropes was all that remained of the fortune teller’s tent. The bran tub lay empty on its side, its remaining treasures scattered over a rosebed. The jumble booth had been overturned, and numerous broken glasses and teacups spoke mutely of havoc in the refreshment tent. The resemblance to a battlefield was weakened, however, by the absence of dead and wounded. There was not a soul in sight.

  The quiet men looked at Henry, and raised their eyebrows slightly.

  Henry said, irritably, “Well, I don’t know what’s happened. It might be anything. You don’t know the Manciples.”

  “Looks like the Fête is over, at all events,” said one quiet man. “Perhaps our bird has flown.” He seemed unaware that he sounded like a character from a very minor film indeed.

  It was at this point that a small, very dirty child emerged from what was left of the refreshment tent. Her face was pale, and she said to Henry, “I think I’m going to be sick.” She was clutching a jam cake in one hand and an ice-cream cone in the other.

  Henry squatted down beside her. “Where is everyone?” he asked.

  “There’s nobody in the tent,” the child confided. “I’ve had five ice creams and three cakes and some marshmallows and jam and I think I’m going to be…” Whereupon she was.

  Henry held her head and wiped her mouth and comforted her. The quiet men stood in a circle, sneering. Henry said, “Do you feel better now?”

  “Yes, thanks,” said the child cheerfully. “Shall we go back and see if there’s any more cake left?”

  “I’d rather know,” said Henry, “where everybody is.”

  The child gestured vaguely. “They all went that way,” she said.

  “To the shooting range,” said Henry.

  “I ’spect so,” said the child. The quiet men stiffened. “There was a whole box of marshmallows. Shall we go and see?”

  “Not just now,” said Henry. He stood up and said to the quiet men, “This way.”

  George Manciple had just handed Julian the loaded gun when the hunt broke through the gap in the privet hedge. Julian was taking careful aim at the roundels of the target, which stood against the lower wall of the range. Edwin Manciple was sitting on the bench, peacefully sorting through the target cards which had been shot at during the afternoon. Beside him, lying on the bench in the pale sunshine, was a leather-bound volume of Homer’s Iliad with the Manciple crest on its spine.

  Frank Mason saw it at once, and shouted, “There it is!”

  Julian wheeled around, the gun in his hand. “What on earth,” he
began.

  “You won’t get away with this,” said Frank. “I know all about you, Manning-Richards, and what you’re after.” He took a step forward.

  “Stand still.” Julian’s voice was like a whip.

  Frank stood still. The others crowded eagerly behind him, trying to get through the gap in the hedge.

  Gently, lovingly, Julian said, “Maud, darling, would you come here a moment?”

  “Maud,” Emmy tried to grab her arm, but it was too late. Maud, with a ravishing smile, pushed her way past Frank and went over to Julian.

  “What is all this about darling?” she said.

  In a flash the gun was at Maud’s temple. She looked mildly surprised, amused. “Julian darling, what…?”

  “If anybody moves,” said Julian, “I shall shoot Miss Manciple.”

  “Julian,” Maud still sounded as though it were a joke.

  “Shut up, you silly bitch,” said Julian. “Get in front of me.”

  Expressionless, Maud stood in front of him, between him and the silent crowd. Julian began to walk slowly backward, toward the gap in the far hedge. As he went, he snatched up the book in his free hand. Each time he took a step backward, Maud did the same. Always the gun was at her head, and she was between Julian and Frank.

  It was in the thicket of this dead silence that Julian and Maud stepped slowly, pace by pace, backward—and into the arms of Henry and the quiet men. Julian realized his danger a split second too late. Henry had time to strike out at his arm before he fired, and the gun went off harmlessly into the air.

  As though the shot had been the signal for the start of a race, pandemonium broke loose. It was still raging as Sir John Adamson and Lord and Lady Fenshire came out innocently into the garden, beaming with refreshment and good will, and all ready to distribute prizes. The prizes were never distributed. The crowd roared like flame over the lawns and down the drive and eventually into The Viking, where everybody had a story to cap the next man’s. All were wildly inaccurate, but that did not matter in the least.